Iron Rage

by James Axler

  Jones pounded a left hammer-fist into the back of Ryan’s head, making his vision swim.

  Ryan rolled onto his back. He grabbed the shoulders of Jones’s camo blouse and lifted.

  Anticipating Ryan’s intention to raise him and pitch him overboard, Jones grabbed a bench with his still-functional left hand, clamped his elbows hard against the side of the boat and began heaving himself forward with all his considerable and scarcely diminished strength.

  Except that wasn’t Ryan’s intention. The treacherous chief did exactly what Ryan wanted him to. The one-eyed man was no weakling. But he preferred to do as much of his fighting as possible in his mind. Going strength-to-strength with an opponent when it wasn’t absolutely necessary was macho posturing—a loser’s game.

  Instead he sat up hard, pulling Jones in the direction the other man was pushing. Jones twisted his body hard, trying to escape when he felt himself being drawn inexorably toward his foe. Unbalanced, Ryan fell onto his right side.

  He planted his boot soles against his side of the boat and used the power of his legs to keep jackknifing and drawing Jones in. The chief got his left arm crooked around his adversary’s neck and tried to crush his windpipe. Ryan got his chin down and blocked the move.

  Ryan’s idea, unless he found an opening right directly, was to drag both of them over his side of the boat and take his chances on grappling in the water. Jones was bleeding. Ryan felt blood warm and slick on his right palm. The CPO was hurt, painfully if not seriously. Ryan was not. After a life spent traversing the Deathlands, Ryan was actually more ready to pit his endurance against any other man’s than his strength. He liked his chances here.

  He felt the other man reach out with his right arm. Instantly he knew Jones was groping for his knife with his good hand. Meanwhile he felt the relentless closing of Jones’s left arm squeezing his chin up and out of position to save his throat. Grabbing his opponent’s left biceps with his left hand, he clutched for his other arm with his right.

  His fingers brushed a sleeve. Before Jones could react, Ryan had his forearm in a claw grip. He pulled the captive limb toward him, away from where he reckoned the knife might be.

  And Jones used his own trick on him. When Ryan pulled his arm, he didn’t pull back. He pushed.

  Instantly his right hand gripped Ryan’s face and tried to pull his head up so he could close the fatal circle around his throat. Ryan reached up and clutched at the hand. It felt as if it were made of iron, and driven by hydraulics. He might have been draining out faster than Ryan, but fury gave him double strength.

  And then the crocodile hit the boat.

  Furiously struggling for his life, Ryan at first thought the impact was his opponent inadvertently kicking the far gunwale. Then he realized the small craft was rocking far too much for it to be that.

  Bringing a great slog of water with it, a croc that had to have been a dozen feet long burst out of Dead Man’s Creek and flopped into the boat with jaws agape. The toothy trap snapped shut on the back of Jones’s shirt.

  Instantly the croc slid back into the water, its bulk pulling Jones inexorably along with it. Ryan let go of him to grab parts of the boat and hang on for dear life.

  For a moment Jones kept his death grip on Ryan’s head. The one-eyed man once again felt his chin slipping out of the way of the man closing his left arm.

  Jones lost his hold. The croc peeled him away from Ryan and dragged him out of the boat.

  But somehow Jones managed to clamp his right hand on the gunwale and hold on despite the immense weight of the crocodile trying to pull him free. His eyes stared at Ryan in desperation from his half-seared face.

  “Please,” he said. “Help me!”

  “You and the croc deserve each other,” Ryan said. He kicked the clutching fingers hard. Bones broke. Jarvis Jones howled as he was plucked away.

  The waters of Dead Man’s Creek closed over his cries.

  Ryan lay in the bottom of the boat breathing hard for several minutes.

  Then he gathered the oars and started rowing back toward the Sippi, never looking back.

  * * *

  “RECKONED YOU’D TURN up about now,” J.B. called as Ryan—running on fumes—rowed the last few feet toward the cleared southern shore where the Queen lay aground, sheathed in red iron. “Now that the hard work is done and all.”

  The little beach was full of people, far more than the ones he’d left behind. Several folks he didn’t know wearing knee-length shorts and T-shirts splashed into the shallows to help him from the boat when he suddenly could not hold his arms up anymore. “Thanks for helping me and all,” he told them as they guided him up onto dry land. “But who in the name of glowing nuke shit are you people?”

  “Funny you should mention that,” said a tall gangly black man with an off-center smile in an off-center face who was standing nearby. “We’re swampers.”

  “Swampers?” Ryan shook his head as if that might clear out the cobwebs. It only made the world spin around him and made him want to puke. He hoped he was just exhausted to the point of dizziness, and not concussed. “No disrespect or anything, but aren’t you supposed to be chilling us?”

  “They’re friends,” J.B. said. “Long story.”

  “Ryan!”

  He lifted his head, which was showing a marked tendency to drop forward, to see Krysty leap from the tugboat’s bow and come running toward him with red hair flying.

  “Best not jump into my arms,” he warned. “I’ll fall right down.”

  She hugged him, but gently. She looked up at his face with green eyes glowing and said, “I knew you’d come back.”

  “What took you so long?” demanded Mildred, who debarked the boat more deliberately than her friend and walked toward the pair.

  “It’s a long story. What happened to the fireblasted boat, J.B.? Looks like a bridge fell on it.”

  “Funny you should say that,” Mildred said.

  “Long story,” J.B. repeated, and then Krysty dragged Ryan’s mouth toward hers for a kiss.

  He didn’t resist.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “So, let me get this straight, J.B.,” Ryan said. “You’re telling me this story about the Confederates building themselves an ironclad in the middle of a nuking cornfield might not even be true?”

  “That’s about the size of it,” the Armorer admitted.

  The Mississippi Queen looked as if somebody had tried to build a long tent on her deck out of railroad rails, but had neglected to pull them together at the top to close it off. Its rail had been covered in hunks of U-beams that had been knocked off the railway bridge by long-ago earthquakes. Random pieces of bridge trusses and other steel scrap had been stuffed in here and there to seal up the armor shell. Mostly. The front ob port had been left clear of major armor, but was covered in sections of decorative but strong-looking steel scrollwork, open enough to see through. Ryan vaguely remembered having seen work like it on the railway bridge. The wheelhouse entrance remained an open oblong. The whole thing struck him as half nightmare, half inspiration, and it was all held together with nothing but baling wire and sheer gall.

  Ryan had spent the past hour sitting on the grass while Mildred stood over him and made him drink a lot of water, and then set about what Joe Trombone called “tinkering up his bruises,” Joe being the long drink of water who had first greeted Ryan ashore. He was leader of the swampers who had helped J.B. carry out his insane scheme, along with a broad woman named Ermintrude. The whole time Krysty had sat by his side, not touching him, as she could see he was one giant mass of bruises, and that any contact would be painful. She did urge him to eat some crocodile jerky.

  He was so hungry that the awful stuff tasted good to him. Thinking about certain of the monsters’ recent meals actually made him feel better about eating it. On the one hand, the bastards had it coming. On the other, it felt like victory by proxy, of sorts.

  He shook his head. “I have to admire your audacity, J.B.,” he said. �
�Not to mention your unlooked-for abilities to bullshit people into carrying out your crazy schemes.”

  “He does remind one of Hernán Cortés, in ways,” Doc commented.

  Ryan was surrounded by most of the surviving members of the Queen’s crew, his companions, plus a whole horde of the swampers, who turned out not to be red-eyed cannie monsters with filed teeth, but folks who appeared to be normal, aside from having a general unhealthy look. They seemed glad for an excuse to take a break, and no wonder.

  “Leaving aside that gentleman’s less-appealing traits, of course. Such as his penchant for mass murder and torture,” Doc added.

  “You don’t actually buy that crap about him burning his boats and then conquering Mexico with just a handful of white guys, do you?” Mildred demanded. “You come right out of that whole colonialist ‘take up the white man’s burden’ time—I mean, school of thought.”

  The old man smiled benevolently. “No, indeed. I have read my Bernal Díaz del Castillo. I don’t even speak of Cortés’s achievement in talking 100,000 native allies into doing the hard work of conquering the Aztecs for him. The Aztecs themselves did the burden of his convincing for him, by their treatment of their neighbors. No, I speak of his ability, not just to fleece his own men of their hard-stolen plunder, but to admit as much to them—as desperate a crew of coldhearts as ever cut a throat—and not just survive, but fleece them again.”

  “Thanks?” J.B. said hesitantly.

  “But his scheme isn’t so crazy, is it, Mr. Cawdor?” Nataly asked earnestly. “You see the evidence before you.”

  Ryan grunted.

  “Yeah. And I got to admit—you pulled it off. That Arkansas story in back of it all may’ve been nothing but a cloud of nuke dust. But it looks as if you’ve written your own legend here.”

  As if he somehow sensed the topic of conversation, Myron Conoyer emerged from belowdecks, wiping his hands on a grimy rag. “Isn’t she beautiful?” he asked.

  His wiry hair was a steel-wool disarray. His coveralls were almost black from grease. His face was streaked with broad swatches of the stuff. Under the crud his cheeks glowed pink, and his eyes were bright with something other than incipient madness. He almost bounced on his feet and looked happy for the first time since his wife had died.

  She’s ugly as two feet up a stickie’s asshole, Ryan thought. But I take your point.

  “Yeah,” he said, and smiled. “Yeah, she is.”

  And he meant that, too.

  “You’ve done a triple-good job, all of you. The wiring-it-up thing is less solid than bolting the armor on, the way they do it on the New Vick ironclads I saw. But you knew that. Fact is, you’re not much less protected than Baron Tanya is in the Pearl, except for the matter of sheer size. That’s pretty ace.”

  “Couldn’t have done it without the swampers,” Arliss stated.

  “Well, we were motivated,” Joe said. “We’re tired of soaking up rads from the ground and the air we breathe, and eating food seasoned with cesium salts. Also, the neighborhood’s going to straight nuke anyway these days, what with the Vicks and the P’villes finally going for each other’s throats.”

  While Mildred had cleaned Ryan up and examined him for major damage—and finding none, at least by his definition of “major”—Krysty had quietly confided that she and the others suspected some kind of internal discord among the swampers was adding to Joe and Ermintrude’s urgency to get their respective groups out of the strontium swamps. Their new allies freely admitted that their two hundred or so people were only a fraction of the population in the inhospitable death zones.

  That was surprising to Ryan. Then again, he had a keen appreciation of the value in the Deathlands of having a home territory that other people actively didn’t want to try to take from you. Or even venture into.

  Ryan stood. The effort didn’t cost him as much as he thought it would. He barely even swayed.

  “So how about it?” he asked. “How soon are we ready to sail?”

  “Mechanically, she is as ready as she’ll ever be,” Myron said, beaming with pride and joy.

  Ryan looked to Nataly and Arliss. While he was inclined to favor the new manic Myron over the suicidally depressed model he’d left behind when he jumped onto the Yarville, he wasn’t sure he trusted his judgment anymore, although the man knew his ship, and her engines. Still, Ryan had gotten used to thinking of the first mate and master rigger as the responsible adults among the Queen survivors.

  The two looked at each other.

  “Reckon the man to ask is J.B.,” Arliss said. “He’s the man with the plan.”

  “What about it?” Ryan asked his friend.

  “Well, we can fool with her and fool with her until the cows come home,” he said, “and if some simp gunner on one of those big ironclads gets a lucky hit, one shell can still blow us all to Hell.”

  “Do you have to be so damned cheerful about it, John?” Mildred demanded.

  “Now’s the time for plain speaking, Millie. Cards on the table.”

  “Good enough,” Ryan said.

  Krysty had risen with him and stood beside him, still not touching, but close enough for Ryan to feel the heat of her well-curved body.

  He smiled at her.

  Krysty’s return smile gave him a warm feeling. She knew just what he had in mind.

  As usual.

  “When can we leave, then?”

  “You just got back, Cawdor,” Joe said in his bantering way. “You in a hurry to clear out again so soon?”

  “Yeah.”

  The swampers laughed.

  “I’m saying the same as Myron,” J.B. said. “She’s ready as she’s going to be. Aside from finishing up some.”

  “I see nothing to keep us here,” Nataly added, “although it will take us a while to get our gear stowed back aboard.”

  “And supplies,” Arliss stated.

  “Right.” Ryan nodded. He looked at the sun. It was already halfway down the sky toward the western weeds.

  “Then I guess you folks might as well head back to your camps,” he told the swampers. “Come back tomorrow with your boats and such belongings as you care to carry along. We’ll go when you’re ready.”

  “Right,” Ermintrude said. Without further word the swampers turned back to the assortment of small craft they had arrived in, and in minutes were paddling back toward the derelict railway bridge.

  Ryan looked to his companions. “Now. Tell me what still needs done, and I’ll get to helping do it.”

  “You sure you feel up to it?” Mildred asked.

  “I’ve caught my breath, Mildred,” he said. “And after your fine ministrations, if I’m not fit to fight, I’m fit to fake it.”

  He looked around at the others. “And since you-all saw to contriving us a ride out of this hellhole, the only way I’m going to stay in it a moment longer than necessary is if I’m staring up at the stars!”

  * * *

  “SO THAT’S YOUR secret weapon?” Joe asked.

  It was full daylight. The sky was mostly clear, but it looked as if they might be in for a storm later. Wolf Creek was crowded with swamper boats as the people of the strontium swamp hitched them to the stern of the Mississippi Queen, along with the motor launch. To Ricky it all seemed to be taking forever, but Ryan did not seem concerned.

  Ricky didn’t have much attention to spare for anything but the Lahti L-39 Ryan and J.B. had uncrated and set up on its sled-like tripod on the shore by the tug’s bow. The weapon was everything he’d expect something called an antitank rifle to be: a tremendously outsize longblaster, almost seven and a half feet long complete with muzzle brake, with a box magazine sticking out the top that held ten 20 mm armor-piercing cartridges and a pistol grip. It was an ugly monster, weighing in at over a hundred pounds.

  Ricky thought he was in love.

  “Will it penetrate ironclad armor?” Nataly asked skeptically.

  “Some of it,” Ryan said. “Their stuff’s not consistent, either�
��they use scrap, and a lot more varied than you did here. It’s not dedicated armored plate or anything. It’s what they could find that fit.”

  “Could you test it?” Jake asked.

  “You know we only have twenty rounds for it,” Arliss said. “We don’t have enough to spare.”

  “She’ll definitely do for keeping the patrol boats off our necks. Otherwise, we need to rely on armor, speed—and luck.”

  “How fast do we dare go?” Nataly asked Joe and Ermintrude. She would have the helm for their escape attempt. As Abner was the best hand with the small boat, the tall, lean, ponytailed woman was most accomplished at steering the tug.

  Not that she or any of them had any experience driving the Queen with all that armor up top, throwing her balance all out of whack.

  “Fast enough to outrun their patrol boats, if she’ll handle it,” Ermintrude said.

  “She will,” Nataly replied. “Even with all that metal piled on her, and drawing your craft behind, she’ll likely be driving less of a load than the barge we were hauling when this mess got started.”

  “What about you, though?” Mildred asked. “We had to go superslow when our launch was towing us.”

  Joe and Ermintrude exchanged looks. “You were mostly riding those cobbled-together rafts,” Joe said. “Any little thing was liable to upset ’em. Or just cause them to come apart.”

  “And we’re double good at handling small boats,” Ermintrude added, with more than a trace of smugness. “That rabbit-looking dude of yours, Abner, he’s all right. But the rest of you—” She shook her head.

  “Your funeral,” Ryan said. “Right now we need to get back to work. I’m antsy to get moving, and this has already taken longer than I expected.”

  “It always does,” J.B. stated. “You should remember that from Trader days. Even an outfit like his.”

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. “But I don’t have to like it.”

  “What about the blaster?” Nataly asked. “You want us to go ahead and load it?”

  “Oh, no,” Ryan said. “It’s going in the cabin with us, and you will not like it when I touch the bastard off in there.”